What did the tenth king of the seventeenth dynasty for the world? nay, why was Ramses great? Ah, confess that you love to linger with Cleopatra more than with Isis, and adore Memnon more willingly than Amun Re! Swart Cleopatra, superbly wound in Damascus silks and Persian shawls, going gorgeously down the Nile in a golden gondola to meet Marc Antony, had more refreshed my eyes than Sesostris returning victorious from the Ganges. Ramses may have sacrificed to Isis, as Cleopatra to Venus. But in the highest heaven all divinities are equal.

Isis was the daughter of Time, and the wife and sister of Osiris. Horus was their child, and they are the Trinity of Philæ. Osiris and Isis finally judged the dead, and were the best beloved Gods of the ancients, and best known of the moderns. Yet the devil Typhoo vanquished Osiris, who lies buried in the cataract, which henceforth will be an emblem to the poetic Howadji of the stern struggle of the Good and Bad Principle. And gradually, as he meditates upon Osiris and Egypt and a race departed, one of the fine old fancies of the elder Egyptians will grow into faith with him, and he will see in the annual overflow of the river the annual resurrection of the good Osiris to bless the land. Tradition buried Osiris in the cataract, and the solemn Egyptian oath, was "by him who sleeps in Philæ." Here was the great temple erected to his mourning widow, and sculptured gigantically upon the walls, the cowhorned, ever mild-eyed Isis, holds her Horus and deplores her spouse.

Very beautiful is Isis in all Egyptian sculptures. Ten

derly tranquil her large generous features, gracious her full-lipped mouth, divine the dignity of her mien. In the groups of fierce fighters and priests, and beasts and birdheaded Gods that people the walls, her aspect is always serene and solacing-the type of the feminine principle in the beast and bird chaos of the world.

The temples are of Ptolemaic times, and of course modern for Egypt, although traces of earlier buildings are still discoverable. The cartouche, or cipher of Cleopatra, our Cleopatra, among the many of Egypt, appears here. The ruins are stately and imposing, and one range of thirty columns yet remains. The capitals, as usual, are different flowers. The lotus, the acacia and others, are wreathed around and among them. Desaix's inscription is upon the wall with its republican date, and that of Pope Gregory XVI.-the effete upon the effete.

The Howadji wandered among the temples. The colored ceilings, the columned courts, the rude sculptures of beasts and birds and flowers-rude in execution, but in idea very lofty-the assembling and consecration of all nature to the rulers of nature-these were grand and imposing. Nor less so in their kind, the huge masses of stone so accurately carved, whereof the temples were built. For the first time, at Philæ, we practically felt the massiveness of the Egyptian architecture. These temples scorn and defy time, as the immovable rocks the river. Yet the river and time wear them each slowly, but how slowly, away. We saw the singular strength of the buildings and the precision of their construction by climbing

the roof by a narrow staircase, built in the wall of the great temple. The staircase emerges upon the roof over the Adytum, or Holy of Holies, with which singular, small apertures communicate. Conveniences for the Gods were these? Divine whispering-tubes? Private entrances of the spirit? Scuttles for Osiris and the fair Isis, or part of the stage-scenery of the worship, wherethrough priests whispered for Gods, and men were cozened by men?

Ah! Verde Giovane! fragments of whose pleasant Philæ breakfast are yet visible on this roof-Time loves his old tale and tells it forever over. Has not the Howadji seen in Rome the Pope, or spiritual papa of the world, sitting in a wooden kneeling figure, and playing pray under that very burning eye of heaven-an Italian sun of a June noonday?

The Arab boys crouched in their blankets in the sun, upon the roof, as if it were cold, for to the Egyptian clothes are too much a luxury not to be carefully used when he has any. They smoked their pipes carelessly, incuriously, as if they were sculptures upon one wall and the Howadji upon another. Pleasant, the sunny loitering, with no Cicerone to disgust, lost in mild musing meditation, the moonlight of the mind. You will have the same red book or another, when you loiter, and thence learn the details and the long list of Ptolemies and Euergetes, who built and added and amended. Thence, too, you will learn the translations of hieroglyphics-the theories and speculations and other dusty stuff inseparable from ruins.

You will be grave at Philæ, how serenely sunny soever the day. But with a gravity graver than that of sentiment, for it is the deadness of the death of the land that you will feel. The ruins will be to you the remains of the golden age of Egypt, for hither came Thales, Solon, Pythagoras, Herodotus and Plato, and from the teachers of Moses learned the most mystic secrets of human thought. It is the faith of Phile that, developed in a thousand ways, claims our mental allegiance to-day-a faith transcending its teachers, as the sun the eyes which it enlightens. These wise men came-the wise men of Greece, whose wisdom was Egyptian, and hither comes the mere American Howadji and learns, but with a difference. He feels the greatness of a race departed. He recognizes that a man only differently featured from himself, lived and died here two thousand years ago.

Ptolemy and his Cleopatra walked these terraces, sought shelter from this same sun in the shade of these same columns, dreamed over the calm river, at sunset, by moonlight, drained their diamond-rimmed goblet of life and love, then embalmed in sweet spices, were laid dreamless in beautiful tombs. Remembering these things, glide gently from Philæ, for we shall see it no more. Slowly, slowly southward loiters the Ibis, and leaves its columned shores behind. Glide gently from Philæ, but it will not glide from you. Like a queen, crowned in death among her dead people, it will smile sadly through your memory

forever.

XXIX.

A Cram that flies in Beaven's Sweetest Dir.

FLEETLY the Ibis flew. The divine days came and went. Unheeded the longing sunrise, the lingering eve. Unheeded the lonely shore of Nubia that swept, Sakia-singing, seaward. Unheeded the new world of African solitude, the great realm of Ethiopia. Unheeded the tropic upon which, for the first time, we really entered, and the pylons, columns and memorial walls that stood solitary in the sand. The Howadji lay ill in the blue cabin, and there is no beauty, no antiquity, no new world to an eye diseased.

Yet illness, said a white-haired form that sat shadowy by his side, hath this in it, that it smooths the slope to death. The world is the organization of vital force, but when a man sickens, the substantial reality reels upon his brain. The cords are cut that held him to the ship that sails so proudly the seas, and he drifts lonely in the jollyboat of his own severed existence, toward shores unknown. Drifts not unwillingly, as he sweeps farther away and his eyes are darkened.

After acute agony, said still the white-haired shadow,